Are some degrees more equal than others?

[sheepdogdelight]

Musing upon this really.

If student A gets a 2:1 from Oxford.
Student B gets a 2:1 from Aston
Student C gets a 2:1 from Wolverhampton

Are these degrees all of equal value?

I know some people will say the one from Oxford is worth more, because, well Oxford. And the one from Wolverhampton is worth less, because, ex polytechnic.
But have the students achieved equal academic excellence in reality?

Oxbridge have a lot of spaces for Classics scholars, far fewer for IT etc. Some Oxbridge courses only have about 2 people applying for each place, medicine freakishly more. Oxford mech eng ing not recognised by the institute. And Oxbridge terms so short that it's not surprising that things are not more intense... You do Oxford (Cambridge to some extent) so that you can go into the City, or v techy/subject

Sweeping generalisations there. I'm sure there is less competition for some courses but that doesn't mean those who get onto them are less able than those who get onto the heavily oversubscribed courses. Also, by no means all Oxbridge graduates go into the City. My son didn't and neither did any of his friends.

I think that ‘who employs the worker’ is also relevant here

So there are controls/ limits on pay for public sector jobs that are not to do with supply and demand (or ‘true value’) but because the state is the only or main employer for that role (and to an extent this also limits for pay for similar jobs in the private sector, because the comparator is pay limited). So for example, teachers or nurses in the private sector are not paid dramatically more than those in the public sector, because at the moment they have no need - if everyone keeps the pay similar to the state sector, teachers or nurses have little freedom to move to drive their pay upwards. Doctors do get paid more (are they worth more to society, by implication?) in private practice, but many have to work at least partly in the NHS fir access to equipment and enough patients in their specialism.

The same is not true for eg private sector investment banks.

As an Oxbridge graduate, I know only 1 person who went into the City (and died tragically young). Most of us are in teaching, academia, civil service, the professions, technical consulting, assorted industrial or tech firms of different sizes. Few vicars. Couple of musicians…. Largest group would be academics, I think.

Dh and most of his Cambridge peers went to the City. Best place to train and earn well but lawyers

So there are controls/ limits on pay for public sector jobs that are not to do with supply and demand (or ‘true value’) but because the state is the only or main employer for that role

But nobody is forcing those teachers or nurses to work at those conditions / they are willingly accepting the (low) pay.

If there wasn't enough supply of such workers, then the Public Sector would have to increase wages.

But nobody is forcing those teachers or nurses to work at those conditions / they are willingly accepting the (low) pay.

They probably don't "willingly" accept the low pay, but those are jobs that they want to do. They don't want to be lawyers or bankers. They would rather give to society than take from society (tongue in cheek )

Guess we give in taxes!

They probably don't "willingly" accept the low pay, but those are jobs that they want to do

This^
The teachers in my family have only ever wanted to teach! They have degrees from prestigious universities and have earned a decent living, but not highly paid, doing the job they love.
Likewise with healthcare. Working in a hospital is a very unique environment and most of the people who spend their lives working in hospital wards or operating theatres would never want to work in a more "normal " environment

but those are jobs that they want to do.

As there are a lot of people who want to do those jobs, there's a lot of supply of staff, hence wages are (relatively) low.

@Lilacsunflowers - loads of nursing and nhs vacancies currently. Supply isn’t great. It is not only about pay (but partially is). Work-life balance and workload (unpaid overtime, intensity) is also a factor. Then there is also the pay-pension variable (many public sector jobs have a lower salary but higher pension than equivalent private sector jobs).

@Lilacsunflowers - loads of people want to be investment bankers, but only a small number employed at high salary. So @cantkeepawayforever saying that who pays the employee also matters, makes sense. The employer wants the ‘best’ by their definition - so they pay high salary in order to generate the demand. The employers aren’t gonna let there be vacancies like in nhs.

loads of people want to be investment bankers, but only a small number employed at high salary. So

True - what I meant was that there is s less supply of 'qualified' employees competing for investment banking jobs than there are for teaching and nhs jobs.

In broad strokes, the standard theory is pretty simple: When a lot of people can do the same job, the wage for that job is pushed down (because more people can supply their labour). When it takes special skills or education to do a job, wages are pushed up, because fewer people can supply their labor. On the demand side, employers are willing to pay more for an employee that can make them more money.

In terms of pay vs number of people willing to do the job, I have a couple of points:

’Vocation’ matters. Where there is an element of ‘vocation’ - of calling to do the job either for itself - musicians, dancers, vicars- or through a belief in the importance of its value to micro ormacro society - healthcare, teaching, civil service - then the pay = value equation doesn’t really work. An extreme example would be highly educated professionals who are SAHM or carers for elderly relatives.As a very highly educated professional who has moved through ‘vocation’ and ‘commercial’ sectors over a career, I have left highly paid ‘commercial’ roles for ‘vocation’ ones because the ‘commercial’ ones just didn’t matter, and so money wasn’t enough

The mechanisms to raise pay in ‘traditionally driven by vocation’ work sectors which are now short in terms of supply of labour - teaching, nursing, care work - are very slow. Society is reluctant to pay more so directly for things that are genuinely valuable but they have traditionally got relatively cheaply. The very large numbers - compared with the small number of eg the highest rank of investment bankers - makes true pay for true value extremely expensive. Currently, the approach is to reduce quality of service to society rather than raise pay enough to fill all vacancies well.

This thread nurses is relevant on vocation vs pay. It’s really clear that those who join midwifery or nursing as a vocation are leaving because the pay is so low for the work required (29 out of every 30 midwives trained leave) but there is no political appetite to raise pay. Therefore students in training are used to fill in for qualified practitioners and the quality of the service declines.

Sorry for sequential posts.

In some ways, I think you can often reverse the usual equation (that high value for society = high pay) where a job is so valuable to society that lots of people see the need for it and want to do it.

Prime minister, say, is far less well paid than the alternative jobs that people with those qualifications could do. It is a job that us vital to the smooth running of our society, and so lots if people want to do it. So in fact the value of the job ensures that pay for it is artificially low.

You have all missed the glaring fact that tax payers pay for stare employees. Through taxes. There are millions of lower paid employees with degrees in industry and commerce too who most certainly earn about the same as nurses and teachers. In fact teachers and nurses have far better pensions. Far better than many private workers. Much earlier retirement is available too. Just look at the doctors. Great salary progression is available to teachers that can, pretty rapidly, take them into higher tax brackets if they do the job well. Especially in secondary schools.
As they have benefits others don’t get, it’s important to compare them with all other grads doing a great variety of jobs.

Not all lawyers earn well. Criminal barristers are busting that myth! Of course their money comes from fees set by the government. Bankers and city lawyers want their roles too but they are a tiny minority of grads. They, in case anyone forget, invest the pension funds of others. Don’t we need expertise for that? Business is vital for the economy. They earn the money for their companies and other investors and are highly rewarded for the expertise.

Society needs high wage earners. It needs their taxes and spending power. We cannot have state employees earning huge amounts without the tax take in the first place. We already have a huge black hole in state worker pensions where the pensions ere unaffordable. Non state employees pay for these too because they are more generous than the contributions from employees. So when comparisons are done, there needs to be a more nuanced debate than nurses vs investment bankers. Having seen my mother on a hospital ward recently, I think I would trust the bankers more than the NHS.

I completely agree on the nuanced debate - I have posted mainly to challenge the incredibly over-simplistic statements that

• pay is a measure of a job’s value to society and
• the quality of a degree is primarily measured by the earnings of its graduates

I think we can agree that neither of those simplistic statements are true!

Society needs high wage earners. It needs their taxes and spending power.

Is the only way of getting tax for well- funded public services through having a large number of the highest wage earners? Does Scandinavia have higher numbers of very high wage earners - bankers, corporate lawyers etc - than the UK?

the quality of a degree is primarily measured by the earnings of its graduates

Actually I think this statement is true when comparing core academic subjects between universities. A degree should allow choice of career and therefore earnings. Therefore if it is claimed that degrees are equal, the median and quartile range of graduate earnings should be equivalent between say 1st class degrees in Maths or an MFL from thé différent universities when adjusted for socioeconomic background of students.
Of course there may be an additional effect from differences in career help and extracurricular opportunities.
This is also applicable to conservatoires and drama schools.

@TizerorFizz - I would not trust investment bankers to do a nurses job without doing nursing training (taught at uni). The consequences of getting it wrong are much bigger. With investment banking, I would trust a nurse to do a grad position (relatives have worked in investment banking - mainly gathering relevant company details to put together into a slide deck which is checked by the whole team) - because the stuff people learn at uni is less important - people learn a lot on the job, there are more people on the team and grads from many different disciplines can go into it.

can nursing be learned on the job? I think it can if we design the course for it. Student nurses already do many placements and work on the wards. Like everything in the nhs, there is so much demand and not enough staff - unfilled vacancies, sickness. I’m sure experienced nurses feel that they don’t have enough time to teach and mentor the students as much as they would like. U.K. has some of the lowest numbers of drs and nurses per capita in developed countries. Training more is inefficient if working conditions are so bad many leave within a few years of starting. Retention rather than training is the bigger issue.

@cantkeepawayforever
Yes. Scandinavian’s are high earners. In this country, get rid of the City at your peril. We don’t have a high earning society. We think we do, but we don’t. We have a high dependency society. When discretionary spending is threatened - just wait and see the consequences for jobs and earnings. The NHS will continue and they have loads of high earners! Loads.

I think some nurses do high level work. I think quite a few are not going that snd don’t need a degree. I wouldn’t trust them to invest my pension!

I do agree. Retention is the big issue. Plus staff not going back to EU countries. That has had huge implications in care homes. We could go with an evaluation of what we can afford too. Who is going to pay for it to he continually bloated? Maybe making it regional would help? Yes. I think it’s not great for some but pays very well for others.

I think what this thread highlights is that we need diversity and we need all these different skills to make a modern society function.

Are some qualifications more equal than others? Probably, but it totally depends what the employer is looking for. The NHS recruiting a charge nurse for a children's cancer ward does not want an economics grad from a Russell group!
The City does not want a highly skilled and qualified cancer nurse.
Are both jobs of equal value to society?
You bet they are

Surely the reason investment bankers get paid well is because they generate a lot of money for their firms? Someone who makes their firm £3m a year is 'worth' paying, say, 400K to retain. That's market forces at work, and in a capitalist society is always going to happen.

It's impossible to compare to a state sector worker who gets paid by the state (ie us) to carry out a job because they aren't generating an income for anyone. They are a cost. What value we, as a society, place on that cost is a whole other matter. I would like to see nurses and teachers paid a lot more, and investment bankers paid a lot less, but that's my personal values, it's not actually how a capitalist society functions.

I hate the utilitarian approach to university. Choosing a degree on the basis of how much money it will earn you in the future seems to me to be at odds with the function of higher education. If all 4 of my DCs said they wanted to be lawyers, as a relative's DCs have, I'd think I'd failed at parenting. How depressingly unimaginative – surely they can't all have a passion for the law?

That said, I'm not convinced that the current system of nurses, physios, midwives etc doing degrees is an improvement on the previous system of on-the-job training in large hospitals. You still studied for 3 years, had to produce written work and got a diploma at the end, but came out of those 3 years of study with much more ward experience, together with an appreciation of how hospitals run and are managed.